Death of a Screenwriter

Two and a half hours away from the Mexico border, in the middle of the desert, Sunny and I climbed the base of Salvation Mountain. We were sweating in the desert sun. The landscape below us was littered with mobile homes and plywood encampments. The people, mostly exiles and vagrants from Los Angeles, looked dirty and helpless in contrast to this holy mountain, painted with melting flowers and trees and messages about God.

We were 1500 miles from Portland with everything we owned packed up inside a 4 x 6 U-Haul trailer strapped to the back of Sunny’s Honda Accord because I was convinced that if we moved to Austin, Texas, I would become a big-time film director and then all you people would finally love me.

(That is the beginning of a story about how I hit bottom in alcohol/sex addiction, taken from my unpublished auto-fiction memoir, I Can Only Give You Everything.)

I moved to Austin, TX, in my early thirties after being accepted into the highly acclaimed undergraduate film program at UT-Austin. I wanted to become a big-time director. Everyone back home in Portland told me that with my years of hands-on experience making and working on other people’s films, film school would be a waste of money. Of course, being the strong-willed person I was, I refused to listen. On a spiritual level, I knew I had to go to Austin; I just didn’t know why. Going to a film school I couldn’t afford seemed as good a reason as any.

Shortly after being accepted, I found my way onto a million-dollar film set starring Danny Trejo and dropped out of my public Ivy League school to become an art director and set dresser on low-budget indie films. I rubbed elbows with Willie Nelson and Charlotte Rampling and worked on the set of Red-Haired Stranger. I made lovely non-alcoholic friends who I made damn sure had no idea about my alcohol/ sex addiction. In the few instances that I let the devil loose in public, I would end up in East Austin, flirting with coke-dealing gangsters or half-naked on the stage of my favorite punk club. All the while, I was writing what I called my “swan song” and what I believed would lead me to becoming a great director like my idols John Waters, David Lynch, and Penelope Spheeris.

The screenplay I was writing was called Matchstick Willie, and it followed the tragic life of a runaway rodeo clown who gives up fame and fortune for a beautiful bi-polar animal rights activist. I pitched this film every chance I got, emailing and bugging any and all producers I would meet on set. For a brief moment a producer from a Hispanic run action film and commercial company (Mutt Productions) took some interest but when I realized he wanted to hire his cousin ( a real clown with no acting experience) with no audition, I moved on to getting the screenplay into the prestigious Nicholl competition and while it made it to the second round of judging, it was rejected shortly after that.

I was living in a fantasy world writing this script about an alcoholic rodeo clown who loses his daughter to his addiction when the love of his life takes her own life. In real life, I was drinking to suppress my inability to control my alcoholic husband and addict father. I was the suicidal mother and the lost daughter in my movie, all wrapped into one. A commercial art director I used to work for asked me one night if I wrote my movie because I had daddy issues. I became enraged with this remark. At the time, I was so out of touch with myself that I failed to see that I was writing this fictional story to try to resolve the rage I had for the men who had broken my heart throughout my life.

In 2018, after a dry period in my industry, I decided to finish my film degree. To my amazement, I was one of ten students in my cohort selected to play the role of director and writer for the senior thesis films. I applied for a grant from the Austin Arts Commission and was awarded the money. More grants and services from my school came through. I found talented actors to play the parts of Matchstick Willie and his estranged daughter, Wilhelmina. While it was clear that a short film version of the feature script was finally going to be made, I was becoming aware of the monsters I had been suppressing and avoiding with my addictions for twenty years. I got sober before we went into production, and it was a disaster. While Tommy Kendrick, who played Matchstick Willie, became a father figure and support system to me, I was unable to work through the weight of what was under my addictions, my untreated C-PTSD. If anything went wrong on set, I would take it out on my crew. To make matters worse, the costume stylist that my wardrobe designer had chosen without my consent had a hidden vendetta against me and sometimes would show up an hour late with the wardrobe in the middle of a paid shoot day.

We were lucky to finish the film. And amazingly, I didn’t drink during that stressful week of filming. While the film went on to win an award and screen all over the country and in Italy, I still felt like a failure. After all, I had wanted a culmination of seven years of effort to skyrocket my career as a director. I realized in sobriety that banking everything on results and fantasies of fame would destroy my creative spirit. What’s more, it cost $8000 to make a fourteen-minute film with yours truly doing all the editing. After meeting a successful speculative fiction writer at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, I decided to play all the parts in my next story and write a book instead.

But who knows, maybe someday, I will go back to filmmaking. In the meantime, you can watch the movie that inspired the dream of coming to Austin, TX, to become a big-time director here:

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Peace, Love, and Anarchy, your pal,

Border Land Delia-Ann

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